Interesting Story of Jan Koum ( Founder of WhatsApp )

JAN KOUM 

Founder of WhatsApp inc

"Every Successful person has its own story of struggle that lead them on the path of success.

Jan Koum is one of them, he is Founder of The Famous messaging App, WhatsApp inc."

Let's take a look at his story.

Koum was born in Kiev, Ukraine. He is Jewish. He grew up in Fastiv, outside Kiev, and moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California in 1992

Ukraine

California

At first Koum's mother worked as a babysitter, while he himself worked as a cleaner at a grocery.

By the age of 18 he became interested in programming. He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.

In 1997, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo.

Yahoo

In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee.

South America

Frisbee

Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook.

In January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps.

He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.

Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up,” and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.

WhatsApp became popular in just a small amount of time, and this has caught Facebook's attention.

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg first contacted Koum in the spring 2012. The two began meeting at a coffee shop in Los Altos, California, then began a series of dinners and walks in the hills above Silicon Valley.

On February 9th, Zuckerberg asked Koum to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed Koum a deal to join the Facebook board.

Lol :D

Interesting Fact:

Jan Koum was part of a group of hackers called w00w00, where he met the future founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.

In November 2014, Koum donated $1,000,000 to the The FreeBSD Foundation, and close to $556 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) the same year.

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